Meet Ira Sachs, the veteran filmmaker whose acclaimed anti-biopic PETER HUJAR’S DAY recreates a day in the life of the legendary photographer. In the following interview, Sachs discusses the challenges of adapting a transcript into a narrative feature, his attention to light and the passage of ti...

Take a tour through a century of daredevil filmmaking with legendary stuntman, stunt coordinator, stunt designer, and second-unit director Buddy Joe Hooker. In the following program, Hooker recounts the early pioneers of Hollywood stunt work in silent comedy and westerns, the later innovations of...

In the latest installment of our Spotlight series, film scholar Racquel J. Gates unpacks Oscar Micheaux’s 1920 classic WITHIN OUR GATES, a landmark of American silent film that deploys stunning cinematic innovations to tell its story from a Black perspective.

Yakima Canutt was the talent behind the amazing physical feats in STAGECOACH, and he would go on to revolutionize Hollywood’s stuntman industry. In this 2010 video piece, acclaimed stunt coordinator and stuntman Vic Armstrong (RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK) offers his thoughts on Canutt and his contrib...

The directors of UNCUT GEMS and GOOD TIME discuss their favorite cinematic fathers, the all-time best New York movies, and why they consider filmmaking inherently pathological.

Get to know the acclaimed Danish Norwegian director, whose latest film, SENTIMENTAL VALUE, is one of the year’s most buzzed-about releases. In the following interview, Trier explores his touchstone themes of time and memory, his connection to modernist filmmakers like Alain Resnais and Federico F...

Find out why author Grady Hendrix calls Ringo Lam “the mad dog of Hong Kong filmmaking” and says that watching one his movies “is like getting a punch to the face.” In the following introduction, Hendrix explores Lam’s unique contribution to the golden age of Hong Kong cinema, relating how he use...

This new piece with writer-director Atom Egoyan was recorded in 2020.

Learn why curator and author Terri Simone Francis calls Jessie Maple a woman who “contained multitudes” in the following introduction. Not only was Maple a tireless advocate for Black independent film—running a cinema out of her Harlem basement—and the first African American woman to become a uni...

Sofia Coppola discusses growing up in a household of legendary cinephiles, the works that opened her eyes to the possibilities of moviemaking, and the films she wants to share with her own children.

In the following introduction, Richard Linklater explores the atmosphere of artistic freedom that drew him to the French New Wave, the subject of his new film NOUVELLE VAGUE. In their pursuit of unfettered personal expression, Linklater sees the directors of that era as the creators of the protot...

The author and filmmaker on a lifetime of moviegoing

In NOUVELLE VAGUE, Richard Linklater recreates the artistic adventure that gave rise to one oft the most radical and influential films of all time: Jean-Luc Godard’s BREATHLESS. Watch Linklater introduce this foundational classic of the French New Wave, a risk-taking work of personal expression t...

What makes Howard Hawks’s films “some of the most purely pleasurable movies in the history of cinema”? In this introduction, critic Imogen Sara Smith explores the Hollywood legend’s approach to improvisation, blending genres, overlapping dialogue, and keen interest in human behavior and interaction.

The following interview with scholar Richard Peña was recorded in 2024.

This introduction by critic and author Grady Hendrix was created in 2023.

Learn why programmer Dennis Lim considers Edward Yang one of the most important filmmakers of the late twentieth century in this introduction to the Taiwanese New Wave director’s essential body of work. Across a small but potent filmography, Yang charted the complex history of his time—as Taiwan ...